Planetary gear arrangements utilizing Ravigneaux type gearing, that is, long and short intermeshing pinions, have a design limitation in that the ring gear meshing with the long pinion must be significantly smaller than the other ring gear and also that the sun gear axially aligned with the smaller ring gear must be significantly smaller than the other sun gear. The difference in size of the ring gears and sun gears is necessary to eliminate the problem of the tips of the gear teeth hitting each other. Such a gear arrangement is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,046,999 issued to Liu et al., Sep. 10, 1991.
To overcome this limitation, it has been proposed to use a stepped diameter pinion as the long pinion gear and/or place the ring gear mesh axially outboard the sun gear mesh, as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,631,476 issued to Ravigneaux or U.S. Pat. No. 2,761,333 also issued to Ravigneaux.